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Donald Nicholson Dies

Jun 01, 2012

Donald Nicholson — the Leeds medical school biochemist who mapped human metabolic pathways — has died, writes Jon Volger in The Guardian. He was 96. Nicholson detailed the interactions between enzymes and metabolites in the body, in various bodily functions and in disease, Vogler says. Before he started his work, only about 20 pathways had been charted. In 1955, Nicholson drew the first combined map of these pathways to determine how they interact. "Over the next 60 years, until just a couple of weeks before his death, he added in the huge numbers of new pathways that biochemists were discovering — currently there are thousands — and progressively improved their presentation," Vogler adds.

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